Introduction

INTRODUCTION This issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly presents five papers which form a coherent whole on the theme ofthe language oflove and the visual imagination in the late middle ages. This theme developed slowly as I sifted through much material in planning the issue; the subject grew out of the research and was not taken as a preliminary design. This introduction will, therefore, proceed with a brief review of the first four papers and conclude with a suggestion as to the significance of the papers as a collection. First, however, I wish to express my thanks to my colleagues, William Blissett, the former editor of the Quarterly, and William Keith, the present editor, for the honour and pleasure they have provided me in allowing this issue to be my editorial responsibility. Thanks are also due to Joan Bulger, the issue's Press editor, who tolerated my delays with unfailing good humour and edited the papers with grace and accuracy. The first paper is by Grover A. Zinn, Jr, on 'Personification Allegory and Visions of Light in Richard of St Victor's Teaching on Contemplation .' As the title suggests, the paper has two parts. In Benjamin minor Richard shows how the rational soul, personified by Jacob, can proceed in disciplined steps to acquire the virtues and detachment needed before contemplation can be achieved. To describe these steps Richard employs a surprising and powerful device; each of Jacob's thirteen children is allegorized, arid the sequence of their births becomes the steps on the path to be traced in orderto gain the virtues and detached inner peace needed for contemplation. Benjamin is the last of Jacob's children, and he signifies ecstatic contemplation; his birth marks the completion of the steps that must be taken by the person seeking the contemplative experience in order to put the world and worldly concerns behind. At the end of Benjamin minor the account of the contemplative experience itself begins and is continued in Benjamin major where it is the main subject. The shift from preparation for contemplation to the experience itself is marked by a pronounced shift from personification allegory to the language of vision and light. Richard connects contemplation with the experience the disciples had of the transfigured Jesus on Mount Tabor, an experience achieved by the rational soul when it becomes a UTQ, Volume XLVI, Number 3, Spring 1977 186 INTRODUCTION mirror for the imaginative vision of God. If the mirror is kept cleansed and mental awareness is concentrated, a vision of divine light begins to illuminate the contemplative. From this reflected lightthe soul is kindled to ardent love and is, at last, able to perceive God directly as living light. Richard is notable for this emphasis on visions of light which mark the transition from the life of virtuous discipline to the contemplative experience , presented as a singular, intense beholding, a penetrating perception by the eyes of the heart. The experience of divine love is characterized by wonder, the ecstasy of the full contemplative experience, and is communicated in terms of light and vision. This paper makes a fresh, if demanding, start to this collection of papers concerned with the uses of light, optics, and vision to express the complex experience of love, especially the interconnections between human love and divine love. Richard of St Victor's two Benjamin tracts date from the period 1153 to 1162; his use of light and visions to express the full contemplative experience may, as Zinn tentatively suggests, have been influenced by Greek sources, but the use of light to convey a sense of God's presence was a traditional commonplace in neoplatonic Christian writing. Richard is unusual in the way he extends this tradition to the specific subject of contemplation. In her paper on 'Thomas Malory and the Pictorial Interlace of La Queste del Saint Graal' Susanna Greer Fein shows how the unknown Cistercian author reinforced, with unobtrusive deftness, the spiritual significance of the Grail material. The forest and the questing knights of the Round Table in it are visualized, so to speak, from above, with the result that their paths form a complex, maze-like design, an entrelacement, which she terms pictorial...